Word: shrewd
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...dreamlike language of fashion," he believes, "a people are communicating the current ideals, values and aspirations of their culture." That idea may be refuted; it may be bought wholesale, on time or at closeout; but the best place to window-shop while thinking it over is this shrewd and knowing introduction to a closet revolution...
...against the ravages of the Great Depression, the elements (a devastating tornado) and the wickedness of the unenlightened (a hypocritical banker, a crooked cotton merchant, even the Ku Klux Klan), Edna is comforted and aided by her two utterly winning children (Yankton Hatten and Gennie James), by a shrewd, gentle, black man (Danny Glover) whom she redeems from rootlessness and petty crime, and by a blind man (John Malkovich) whom she redeems from bitterness. As these archetypes of disenfranchisement assemble in her kitchen, a bonding of proletarian fiction and gaslit theater takes place. And a wary customer may be forgiven...
...Solomon is a myth. Says David: "I'll let you in on a secret about my son Solomon: he was dead serious when he proposed cutting the baby in half, that putz. I swear to God. The dumb son of a bitch was trying to be fair, not shrewd." Dialogues between exasperated father and nincompoop son appear to be modeled on the old radio sketches of Jack Benny and Dennis Day. David: "Do you understand what I'm saying to you about Joab? Do not let his hoar head go peacefully down to the grave." Solomon: "What...
...White House. In a recent column he complained that though he had once been a "lonely Reagan booster," he has been denied any interviews with Reagan because Safire "from time to time was-in Mr. Reagan's words to a press aide-hostile to us." Partly out of shrewd instinct, partly out of puckish perversity, Safire cannot be counted in anyone's corner, but "when my right-wing confreres and pols depart from principle I feel particularly pained." His working motto is "Kick them when they're up." He recently defended Bert Lance when he was down...
DIED. Pierre Gemayel, 78, courtly, shrewd and strong-willed political chieftain of Lebanon's Christians, a key powerbroker in the country's factional political strife, and father of President Amin Gemayel and his brother Bashir, who was killed in 1982 before he could assume the presidency; of a heart attack; in Bikfaya, Lebanon. He helped found the right-wing Phalange Party in 1936 to protect the interests of Maronite Christians from submergence by Islam and a year later assumed its leadership; he fought French colonialists, Muslim rivals, Christian competitors, Syrians and Palestinians, and he survived several assassination attempts...